ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the dramatic growth in the number of township and village enterprises (TVEs), from 1.52 million in 1978 to 23 million in 1996. It examines the changes in the business sector, from the predominance of manufacturing in 1993 to the predominance of service industries like commerce and food after 1994. The 1996 Chinese Industrial Development Report provided an analysis of the ownership structure of TVEs for year-end 1994. The chapter then presents the position occupied by industrial TVEs in China's overall industrial sector by three measures: number of enterprises, total employees, and total output value. Looking first at the total number of enterprises, in 1995 the number of TVEs was 6.52 million, an overwhelming, nearly 90 percent share. This is because of the large number of small and unsubstantial enterprises among TVEs. Total TVE employment was 7.3 million persons, about 50 percent of total sector employment.
